A presentation for Research Data at the Edge, Day One of Duke Research Computing Symposium
Why?
- The Web has lots of stuff
- frontier beyond curated datasets
- stuff is wrapped in HTML
- The HTML is transported over HTTP but composed for h2m consumption
- Intellectual Property Rights bear serious consideration
API
Application Program Interface
- Built for machine-to-machine interactions
- Instructions for programs
Client / Server
- Make [R] interface with the web, same as h2m but now m2m
Human Simulation
- Human version
- Person uses Web Client
- Person enters a URL
- client & server negotiate

- Information is sent back in wrapped HTML
- Web Browser parses the HTML
JSON
- Javascript Object Notation is a language-independent data format
- Currently the most common data data format for asynchronous client/server communication format
- Consists of key-value pairs
# from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON
{
"firstName": "John",
"lastName": "Smith",
"isAlive": true,
"age": 25,
"address": {
"streetAddress": "21 2nd Street",
"city": "New York",
"state": "NY",
"postalCode": "10021-3100"
},
"phoneNumbers": [
{
"type": "home",
"number": "212 555-1234"
},
{
"type": "office",
"number": "646 555-4567"
},
{
"type": "mobile",
"number": "123 456-7890"
}
],
"children": [],
"spouse": null
}
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